it stated that the US has US$11.3 Trillion belonging to
4,585,000 persons in the 'millionaire
group' and 371,000 in the 'billionaires group'.
USA political affairs is largely under the influence of this
great powerful corporate and financial group.
If Obama truely seeks change in USA, he will have to deal with
this group.
...Any reform of Wall Street practices came from pressure from
the hinterlands, especially from the farming West, and was long
delayed by the close alliance of Wall Street with the two major
political parties, which grew up in 1880-1900.
In this alliance, by 1900, the influence of Morgan in the
Republican Party was dominant, his chief rivalry coming from the
influence of a monopoly capitalist, Rockefeller of Ohio.
By 1900 Wall Street had largely abandoned the Democratic Party,
a shift indicated by the passage of the Whitney family from the
Democrats to the Republican inner circles, shortly after they
established a family alliance with Morgan.
In the same period, the Rockefeller family reversed the ordinary
direction of development by shifting from the monopoly fields of
petroleum to New York banking circles by way of the Chase National
Bank.
Soon family as well as financial alliances grew up among the
Morgans, Whitneys, and Rockefellers, chiefly through Payne and
Aldrich family connections.
For almost fifty years, from 1880 to 1930, financial capitalism
approximated a feudal structure in which two great powers, centered
in New York, dominated a number of lesser powers, both in New York
and in provincial cities.
No description of this structure as it existed in the 1920's can
be given in a brief compass, since it infiltrated all aspects of
American life and especially all branches of economic life.
At the center were a group of less than a dozen investment
banks, which were, at the height of their powers, still
unincorporated private partnerships. These included J. P. Morgan;
the Rockefeller family; Kuhn, Loeb and Company; Dillon, Read and
Company; Brown Brothers and Harriman; and others.
Each of these was linked in organizational or personal
relationships with various banks, insurance companies, railroads,
utilities, and industrial firms.
The result was to form a number of webs of economic power of
which the more important centered in New York, while other
provincial groups allied with these were to be found in Pittsburgh,
Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston.
J. P. Morgan worked in close relationship to a group of banks
and insurance companies, including the First National Bank of New
York, the Guaranty Trust Company, the Bankers Trust, the New York
Trust Company, and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
The whole nexus dominated a network of business firms which
included at least one-sixth of the two hundred largest nonfinancial
corporations in American business.
Among these were twelve utility companies, five or more railroad
systems, thirteen industrial firms, and at least five of the fifty
largest banks in the country.
The combined assets of these firms were more than $30
billion.
They included American Telephone and Telegraph Company,
International Telephone and Telegraph, Consolidated Gas of New
York, the groups of electrical utilities known as Electric Bond and
Share and as the United Corporation Group (which included
Commonwealth and Southern, Public Service of New Jersey, and
Columbia Gas and Electric), the New York Central railway system,
the Van Sweringen railway system (Allegheny) of nine lines
(including Chesapeake and Ohio; Erie; Missouri Pacific; the Nickel
Plate; and Pere Marquette); the Santa Fe; the Northern system of
five great lines (Great Northern; Northern Pacific; Burlington; and
others); the Southern Railway; General Electric Company; United
States Steel; Phelps Dodge; Montgomery Ward; National Biscuit;
Kennecott Copper; American Radiator and Standard Sanitary;
Continental Oil; Reading Coal and Iron; Baldwin Locomotive; and
others.
The Rockefeller group, which was really a monopoly capitalist
organization investing only its own profits, functioned as a
financial capitalist unit in close cooperation with Morgan.
Allied with the country's largest bank, the Chase National, it
was involved as an industrial power in the various Standard Oil
firms and the Atlantic Refining Company, but it controlled over
half the assets of the oil industry, plus the $2 1/3 billion assets
in Chase National Bank.
Kuhn, Loeb was chiefly interested in railroads, where it
dominated the Pennsylvania, the Union Pacific, the Southern
Pacific, the Milwaukee, the Chicago Northwestern, the Katy
(Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad Company), and the Delaware and
Hudson. It also dominated the Bank of Manhattan and the Western
Union Telegraph Company for a total of almost $11 billion in
assets.
The Mellon group centered in Pittsburgh dominated Gulf Oil,
Koppers, Alcoa, Westinghouse Electric, Union Trust Company, the
Mellon National Bank, Jones and Laughlin Steel, American Rolling
Mill, Crucible Steel, and other firms for total assets of about
$3.3 billion.
It has been calculated that the 200 largest nonfinancial
corporations in the United States, plus the fifty largest banks, in
the mid-1930's, owned 34 percent of the assets of all industrial
corporations, 48 percent of the assets of all commercial banks, 75
percent of the assets of all public utilities, and 95 percent of
the assets of all railroads.
The total assets of all four classes were almost $100 billion,
divided almost equally among the four classes. The four economic
power blocs which we have mentioned (Morgan; Rockefeller; Kuhn,
Loeb and Company; and Mellon) plus du Pont, and three local groups
allied with these in Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago, together
dominated the following percentages of the 250 corporations
considered here: of industrial firms 58 percent of their total
assets, of railroads 82 percent, and utilities 58 percent.
The aggregate value of the assets controlled by the eight power
groups was about $61,205 million of the total assets of $198,351
million in these 250 largest corporations at the end of 1935.
The economic power represented by these figures is almost beyond
imagination to grasp, and was increased by the active role which
these financial titans took in politics. Morgan and Rockefeller
together frequently dominated the national Republican Party, while
Morgan occasionally had extensive influence in the national
Democratic Party (three of the Morgan partners were usually
Democrats).
These two were also powerful on the state level, especially
Morgan in New York and Rockefeller in Ohio. Mellon was a power in
Pennsylvania and du Pont was obviously a political power in
Delaware...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/